In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.

A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

A female professor at a contemporary university remembers an old conversation with a former teacher of hers, which prompts her to reconsider her job, solitude, and love of reading.

A woman grows obsessed with a single book from the time she is a young adult to her death in old age, as the book's meaning changes for her over time.

In an eccentric take on the afterlife, a recently deceased man in his mid-20s reminisces on his life and marriage--two things he gradually learns were more complicated than he initially assumed.

A graduate student, on a trip in the Sonoran Desert, contemplates quitting her PhD program and moving on with life.

Upon returning to Paris after a decade-long hiatus wandering the French countryside and writing an epic, a poet encounters an enigmatic young woman who believes he is a god and wants to be his disciple,

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.